Monday, January 21, 2008

On a bus or a taxi going through Kyoto, Japan in August 1990 I saw a club called "Pignose Jazz." The name was burned in my memory for some reason, probably because I was just starting to fall in love with jazz at that point in my life.

A quick google search yields a "talk about Kyoto" page (in Japanses) listing "Pignose" along with a couple other jazz clubs. I am oddly gratified that the place still exists, despite never having set foot in the place.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

A friend who works at the local GW store has asked me to paint the store's Ork "Skullhamma" tank. It's an interesting model insomuch as there is no official model for it. It is a conversion of an Imperial Guard Baneblade tank. It dwarfs my mostly assembled Ork Trukk! Someone else did the converting, so I'm biting my lip and ignoring all the mold lines and things that I would not have left. This is for the store, it's for fun, and I have other commission work that I need to be doing.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Humor: Yesterday we tried to clean the dishwasher out by putting a quarter cup or so of Melaleuca'sTough and Tender into it and running it for a cycle. Problem: Tough and Tender foams. We had a mess on our hands of Bradybunchian proportion. The nice part is that everyone was cheerful and the whole family chipped in to help clean up the suds. Good times.

Melancholy: My daughter Sarah turns 9 in a couple weeks. It has occurred to me that half of her time living with us (give or take) has gone. It was too quick. I won't be ready when she's 18. I don't even want to think about it right now.

Exasperation: I don't know who keeps challenging this, but Planeswalker's Magic Bag is a real store! Angelos has worked his tail off to build that place from the ground up, and to have people continue to call his suppliers challenging the fact that it's a real store is beyond reproach. I've been to the store a couple times, and it's got a nicer games section than a lot of hobby stores I've seen, plus gaming space and a paint bar! It's in downtown Munith, a small town on its own but on a heavily traveled route, so he gets tons of visual hits from the people driving by. Angelos seems to take the whole thing in good humor, but I'm sure he's irked by these little acts of sabotage. He's growing a successful business, and somebody isn't happy about it.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Over the last year I have won a few things at the Games Workshop store, mostly through random drawings and some through painting contests. The end result is that I had a few blister packs that I wouldn't normally buy or paint, so I decided to give them a go for eBay over my break. Here they are, and the pictured link to ebay.I don't tend to paint demony things for the most part, but it was free and I figured maybe I could fleece some chaos players of a few bucks. It was a one night paint job, and the wings are scratch built. (Yes, I will use my new scratch building expertise to make a plain, blue police box!) Chaos armies, especially those of "Khorne, the Blood God" just seem like an adolescent power fantasy to me. (Yes, I realize that the whole hobby is an adolescent power fantasy. Khornate armies just take that to its embarrassing extreme.)The Empire Warrior Priest, on the other hand, was big fun. The original figure is "Valten on warhorse" which I don't think has a lot of potential for sale, since Valten is a character from GW's summer campaign 2004. In the end of campaign write-up he was murdered by Skaven assassins (hooray for rats!) so I decided to brand him as a regular, fieldable hero and not "dead guy from three years ago." The Skaven skull that I put on the base is an homage to the original figure. The gold was done using the technique I learned from Tim Lison. I'm not much of a horse person, so I struggled a little with the coloring. Mark helped me bring the tone down to something less distracting than I had originally used.

For some reason I decided both of minis needed shields. Neither came with one. I think the shields complement them well.